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There's a 15-year age gap between the writers of this column. One of us remembers football games on the old Atari 1040, a magnificent computer with a whole 1meg of ram which was powered by coal. Smoking dope and playing Jeff Minter's Revenge Of The Mutant Camels was one of life's simple pleasures.
The other's football gaming life began on the Spectrum and Commodore 64, but it's Kick Off 2 on the Amiga that is most fondly remembered by both of us. By the time of International Superstar Soccer and Sensible Soccer, other interests were coming to the fore, ones involving a different sort of relentless joystick abuse. But many a happy hour was spent with the simple, hugely addictive Kick Off 2 with its top-down camera and squat, bustling little blocky figures which made even the tallest lithe player look like a mini Jay Spearing.
It was a bit like watching Barcelona from a hot air balloon, except without the cheating and having to listen to pretentious arrivistes jizz on about the marvellous footballing spectacle.
This was a proper game. Nothing at all like reality and with no aspirations to be like reality. This was not a weakness. We have reality all around us; too much bloody reality we might say. A game is a game; an escape from the way the world looks the rest of the time. To this end, it was always much more fun to make up names of players and assign characteristics to them and invent a world within which they existed. Picking 'real' players destroyed or at least confused the fictional aspect of game-playing.
One half of this column lost some of the best years of its college days to Championship Manager 2 and CM 97/98, regularly turning down actual carnal funtimes (with a real live lady and everything) in favour of an invariably frustrated, drink and drug-fuelled bid to make Hibs a force in European football. Or even in Scottish football. Great days; and who is to say that getting a good degree would have been any use in later life anyway?
Returning to play this year's iteration of Football Manager, the magic had gone. Perhaps the cruel march of time and something approaching responsible adulthood, more likely that the game itself has simply got too good, too realistic. It pains to say it, but precisely setting the amount of fitness training for the youth squad left backs is not quite the thrill it once would have been. That being said, we seem to live in an internet world where success at football management games seems, in the heads of some players, to equate with being knowledgeable about real-life football. This is often a delusion.
These days, it's all your FIFA on the PS3 and Xbox, of course. FIFA12 sold 3 million units in its first week; and it has overall sold 2.4 million units in the UK alone. Publisher Electronic Arts was predicting revenue of $3.7 billion in the year ahead. This, quite clearly, is serious business. No doubt you will have played it: the depth, excitement and sheer addictive fun of it are a remarkable achievement.
Which brings us to the real point of this column. We wonder how these incredible football games are changing young folks' experience of real football. With a nifty combination of left trigger and button A, or whatever, you can make Wayne Rooney perform a Cruyff turn, slam the ball home from 30 yards and wheel away in celebration to the shrieks of Martin Tyler, all from the comfort of your own bedroom. Would this make the spectacle of Sheffield Wednesday versus Blackpool on the tellybox seem somehow less engrossing (no, really) to a ten-year-old kid? Or make Clinton Morrison seem a lumbering beast in comparison?
Or more specifically, make the real Wayne Rooney look less than stellar when he is going through one of his usual half-season long slumps in form? Does the impatience of the modern fan - as evidenced by behaviour such as the half-time booing off of your own team when it has the temerity to be drawing 0-0 - derive in part from their failure to match their electronic other-world shadows?
Do the incredible levels of fun and entertainment in these games make it even more likely that the new generation of football fans will be a generation of plastics, interested only in Barcelona and Man United and the other handful of big teams, because they are the ones who have the players who do the coolest sh*t on their consoles? As technology gets better and better, could real football pale into comparison?
Sorry for getting all sci-fi and rise of the machines on your asses. Just a thought. And at least we haven't talked about Harry effing Redknapp.
John Nicholson and Alan Tyers
Johnny's written a new book - it's called 'The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime Of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me', and you can order it here.
And you can still get his other book, 'We Ate All The Pies'.
Or check out Alan's 'CrickiLeaks: The Secret Ashes Diaries'.
Follow Alan on Twitter here or Johnny here.
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